“I’m in love with this book! It illuminates the forces that make parenting so difficult, and helps us develop better relationships with our kids—and ourselves.” —Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE, author of Raising Good Humans
Parenting is hard. But when we replace conventional parent-child power dynamics with collaboration, family life gets easier today—and we create a better world for all of us in the future.
When we see our children stalling, resisting, having tantrums, using mean words, and hitting, we want to just make it stop. But conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences” teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice.
Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children’s needs, and ours too—perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that work for everyone.
Family life becomes radically easier in the short term because behavior problems tend to melt away. In the long term, we’ll raise children who confidently advocate for themselves and treat others with profound respect.
Includes sample scripts, flowcharts, and resources to help parents learn and implement this new approach.
—”The compassionate guidance will be a boon to parents eager to move away from punitive child-rearing strategies.”—Publisher’s Weekly
We rightly admire self-disciplined people. Because whatever your goals are — from making the Olympics or starting a business to writing a novel or sticking to a new diet — self-discipline is often a key ingredient.
Still, self-discipline is a misunderstood concept, mainly because we think about it as a fixed personality trait. But here’s what most people don’t understand:
Self-discipline is more about habits than genetics.
As a psychologist, I work with a lot of people struggling to be more disciplined in their lives. And what I’ve noticed is that it’s not for lack of desire or motivation…
The reason we struggle to be more disciplined isn’t a moral failing or faulty genes — it’s that bad habits interfere with our natural ability to be disciplined.
If you want to become a more self-disciplined person, learn to identify these habits and eliminate them. Self-discipline won’t be far behind.
1. Relying on willpower
People with a lot of self-discipline understand that willpower is a last resort.
Think about willpower like the emergency brake in your car — it’s nice to have, but you would be in serious trouble if you relied on it as the primary way to slow your car down.
Willpower should never be a primary strategy for accomplishing difficult things.
Self-disciplined people understand that there are far more effective strategies for staying committed to challenging goals and tasks. For example, a “secret weapon” many high-discipline people take advantage of is environmental design.
The basic idea is that instead of pushing yourself through a goal, it’s better to design your environment to be conducive to the goal and pull you through it.
For example:
Let’s say you need to study intensely for an upcoming exam. Instead of trying to “stay focused” studying at home when you’re bombarded by distractions, from the big TV in your living room to the roommate bugging you about going out to a bar, pack up your things, go to a library, leave your phone in the car, and find a back corner of the building where few people visit.
Better to avoid temptations in the first place than trying to resist them.
Self-disciplined people understand that they don’t have nearly as much willpower as other people think they do. And they understand that willpower is a fragile thing that often fails us. As a result, they don’t rely on it and get creative about other ways to stay focused and committed.
If you want to become more disciplined, ask yourself this question:
How would I achieve my goals if I had zero willpower?
2. Waiting for motivation
Self-disciplined people view motivation as extra credit — nice to have when it shows up, but never to be expected or counted on.
Feeling inspired and motivated to hit the gym, study for a test, or work on that backyard project is great. We all love that feeling because it makes it relatively easy to do hard things.
But here’s the thing:
Feeling a surge of motivation is not required to do hard things.
People think that “if I’m not feeling it” I can’t really do it or it’s not worth even trying. We go about our lives waiting for inspiration to strike, but all the while our dreams, goals, and aspirations fade further and further into memory as life seems to pass us by.
Self-disciplined people don’t fall into this trap because they understand the true nature of the relationship between feeling and action:
Action leads to feeling just as often as feeling leads to action.
In other words, the relationship between feeling and action is a two-way street: Sure, feeling good helps you do hard things; but doing hard things makes you feel good — in particular, it makes you more motivated to do future hard things.
Self-disciplined people have an action-bias.
They understand that the only way to feel consistently motivated is to build the habit of consistently taking action — even if it’s very small actions initially.
It’s true: Self -disciplined people are more motivated than the rest of us. But it’s not because of luck or good genes. They simply understand how to create their own steady stream of motivation by taking action despite how they feel instead of waiting around for the feeling.
Stop waiting around for motivation and learn to build your own.
3. Trusting your feelings
Self-disciplined people know that feelings are not to be trusted.
Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to your feelings and be aware of them. In fact, highly disciplined people are often very in touch with their moods and emotions. But they’re not ruled by them.
Self-discipline requires a healthy skepticism of your own emotions.
The key insight here is that while emotions often communicate important information, they can just as often lead us astray.
When you’re hiking through the mountains and your anxiety pops up because you hear a sudden rattling sound, that’s probably a good thing — your brain’s way of quickly preparing you for the possibility of stepping on a rattlesnake!
On the other hand, when an email from your boss shows up in your inbox saying simply “we need to talk,” your anxiety might be shouting at you that something’s wrong, but it’s perfectly possible that your boss was just in the middle of a meeting and didn’t have time to compose a full message.
Here’s another way to look at it:
Emotions are behavioral heuristics — your mind’s guesses about how you should act. Worth paying attention to, but not to be followed blindly.
Your relationship with emotions matters for cultivating self-discipline because how you feel will often conflict with your values:
Your value may be to work out first thing in the morning, but your feelings will try and convince you to get another 30 minutes of sleep.
Your value may be to stick to a single serving at each meal, but your feelings will try and convince you to get more calories.
Your value may be to ask your boss for a much-deserved raise, but your feelings will try and convince you that something terrible will happen if you confront her about it.
If you want to become more self-disciplined, cultivate a skeptical relationship with your emotions.
Listen to your emotions but avoid taking orders from them.
4. Worrying about outcomes
Self-disciplined people have a knack for staying focused on effort and ignoring outcomes.
One of the biggest ironies of self-disciplined people is that they appear to be very goal-oriented. They have many goals, steadily work toward them, and often achieve them — sometimes to an almost amazing degree.
But here’s the trick:
Self-disciplined people are able to make consistent progress toward their goals precisely because they don’t spend much time thinking about them.
Instead, self-disciplined people keep their focus on their actions — things they can actually do and control. Things that, if done consistently over time, will likely lead to the desired goal or outcome.
Put another way, self-disciplined people have a healthy relationship with control. They understand that they can’t actually control goals and outcomes. All they can control is their efforts:
You can’t control whether a novel gets written. You can control whether you write 300 words each day during your lunch break.
You can’t control whether you lose 20 pounds. You can control whether you have dessert or not.
You can’t control the grade you get on a test. You can control how often you study.
Spending too much time thinking about your goals is a distraction from the things you actually have control over — your actions.
The best attitude toward outcomes and goals is to “set it and forget it.”
You need to think about your goals initially. And it’s nice to relish in them for a while once you’ve accomplished them. But for most of the long middle, keep your eye off the prize and focus on the small actions you can take right now.
Don’t waste your energy on things you can’t control.
All You Need to Know
If you want to become more self-disciplined, work to identify and eliminate these four habits:
Relying on willpower
Waiting for motivation
Trusting your feelings
Worrying about outcomes
? ? Want to improve your self-discipline?
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Welcome November! October is now over which means we’re officially “done” with the eclipse season.
The last Lunar Eclipse in Taurus came with power cut-offs; I didn’t have internet access for a few days.
Power cut-offs are very archetypal eclipse energies. At an eclipse, one luminary is ‘eclipsed’ or shadowed so it doesn’t operate in the same way it usually does. When we have a Solar Eclipse, the disk of the Sun is eclipsed or shadowed by the disk of the Moon.
At a Lunar Eclipse (like this one we just had) the Moon is eclipsed by the shadow of the Earth. At a symbolic level, this means that there are earthy circumstances that interfere with the Moon’s plans, demanding our immediate attention.
If there’s one thing I learned about astrology, it is to always go with the universe’s timing, not with my personal timing. The universe always knows best, simply because it has a greater perspective.
But there are times when our individual perspective matters.
If in October we had the eclipses, and the most prominent planet was fated and transformative Pluto, now in November, the most prominent planet is Mars, the planet of personal will.
We are in Mars-ruled Scorpio season, we have a New Moon in Scorpio conjunct Mars, and a brand new Mars synodic cycle starts in the sign of Scorpio.
This is interesting because Mars is the lower octave of Pluto, which means there’s a relationship between these 2 planets.
If October brought us eclipses and fated events (Pluto), in November it’s time to take a step back and look inside. What does it all mean, from an individual perspective?
Mars is our drive to assert ourselves and go for what we want. When we activate our inner Mars, we walk the path.
We are on our hero’s journey.
We learn about the world around us. We fail, we get back up, and we fail again. We eventually get to the finish line, which, irrespective of the outcome, is a victory in itself.
What happens when we don’t activate our inner Mars? We stop trying. We give up. We close up in our little bubble.
But the world doesn’t stop spinning. Planets don’t stop circling the Sun. We still experience things happening to us. And because we lack the Mars training, we don’t know how exactly to deal with life’s challenges and adversities.
That’s why mastering our inner Mars is soooo important. This month, especially mid-November, between the New Moon in Scorpio and the exact Sun-Mars conjunction, is your chance to get in touch with your inner Mars and start a brand new 2-year Hero’s journey.
In November, good things come to those who dare.
But let’s take a look at the most important astrological events of the month:
November 4th, 2023 – Saturn Goes Direct
On November 4th, 2023 Saturn goes direct at 0° Pisces. 0° of any sign is a powerful degree. It’s the purest energy of the sign, as archetypal as it can possibly be. Saturn’s station invites us to reflect on this transit’s significance in our life.
How do you experience the taskmaster of the zodiac in the boundless, imaginative realm of Pisces?
Are there any specific themes (revealed by the natal house triggered by Saturn) that are surfacing in your awareness? How can a Saturn in Pisces approach help you navigate these themes and improve your life?
November 8th, 2023 – Venus Enters Libra
On November 8th, 2023 Venus enters her domicile sign, Libra.
In electional astrology – where astrologers pick auspicious transits to time an event, they particularly look for planets with strong essential dignity, i.e. when the planet is either in the sign of its domicile or exaltation.
Why is that? It is believed that when a planet has strong essential dignity it operates at its best, producing more favorable results.
What does it mean? When Venus is in domicile in Libra, Venus-related themes, events and activities are favored. Do you want to start dating? Go to a party? Make some financial investments? Get yourself a new wardrobe? Now it’s the time!
The house that transit Venus triggers in your chart will reveal more about the specific areas of life that will benefit from these favorable Venusian energies.
November 10th, 2023 – Mercury Enters Sagittarius
On November 10th, 2023 Mercury enters Sagittarius. Talking about essential dignity, Mercury is in detriment in Sagittarius.
Does it mean Mercury in Sagittarius is a negative placement? Not at all.
It’s just that the archetypal Mercurian energy – facts before intuition, individual perspective vs. collective perspective, or analytical thinking vs. abstract reasoning – aligns very well with signs like Gemini or Vigo, but not so much with Jupiter-ruled signs like Sagittarius or Pisces.
Mercury in Sagittarius looks for the “meaning of it all” but in the process of finding the philosophical, absolute truth, it may skip some important details which may lead to not so fact-checked conclusions.
But Mercury in Sagittarius can be a transit for many reasons. While it’s great to have a factual, objective Mercury in Gemini mind when we read the news for example, life is not only about reading the news or seeking cold, hard facts.
Sometimes we need a good Sagittarius story. Mercury in Sagittarius is the storyteller of the zodiac.
When Mercury is in Sagittarius, our mind becomes more imaginative and explorative. Our communication, more colorful and engaging. Our perspective of the world broadens, and we start to see the world through the Sagittarian lens of possibilities and adventures.
November 13th, 2023 – New Moon In Scorpio
On November 13th, 2023 we have a New Moon at 20° Scorpio. The New Moon in Scorpio is closely conjunct its ruler, Mars. Sun and Mars are in close vicinity for the entire month, but at the New Moon in Scorpio, the Moon also joins the Halloween party.
The mantra of the New Moon in Scorpio is “Tell me what you want, what you really really want”.
Your desires are the most powerful force in the universe. Your desires are what the universe wants to happen in the world. Your desires are what the universe wants to manifest, through you.
Becoming aware of what you want is the very first step. The New Moon in Scorpio is your celestial opportunity to gain crystal clarity about the nature of your deepest desires. This clarity will initiate a powerful co-creative journey with the universe.
November 18th, 2023 – Sun Conjunct Mars In Scorpio
On November 18th, 2023 Sun is conjunct Mars at 26° Scorpio. When the Sun is conjunct Mars, Mars starts a new 2-year synodic cycle, or yet another Hero’s Journey.
On your quest, you sometimes run, sometimes you rest, other times you stop to catch your breath. You find new challenges on the way. You discover new strengths, and meet new people.
You have no idea what’s ahead of you. There may be risks and dangers. Some of the obstacles may test you along the path. But it’s this journey that will help you grow, learn, and ultimately become a stronger and more resilient version of yourself.
The Sun conjunct Mars transit sometimes goes overlooked because we have one Sun-Mars conjunction every 2 years. We experience an average 40 Sun-Mars transits in a lifetime. That’s quite a few hero’s journeys.
We have approx 40 opportunities to start again, with each journey learning a little bit more about ourselves and the world we live in.
Each transit conjunction comes with a choice: are you in, or are you out?
How many journeys have you said “no” to in the past? What will you do this time?
Staying in our comfort zone certainly has its advantages. It’s cozy. Nothing can hurt us. But it’s also a little bit boring. What you truly want can only be found ‘out there’. Not on the couch.
There’s something about the nature of desire that asks us to look for it beyond the boundaries of our familiar surroundings. It pushes us to explore, to take risks, and to embrace the unknown.
November 24th, 2023 – Mars Enters Sagittarius
On November 24th, 2023, Mars enters Sagittarius.
After we got in touch with our desire (New Moon in Scorpio) and made the decision to embark on a new journey (Sun conjunct Mars), now with Mars in Sagittarius, it’s time to pack our bags and prepare for the adventure.
November 27th, 2023 – Full Moon In Gemini
On November 27th, 2023 we have a Full Moon at 4° Gemini. We talked a lot about Mars this month and we are going to talk a bit more about it because the Full Moon in Gemini is now opposite Mars.
We are now face to face with Mars, and this new angle allows to look at our desires from a more objective perspective, and acknowledge some otherwise hidden or overlooked drivers and motivations.
The Full Moon in Gemini is the missing piece of the puzzle. By now, you may have a clear picture of what you want, but you may not exactly know how to get there. “Ah, this is why I want that, and this is how I’m going to get it”.
The Full Moon in Gemini, with its inquisitive and objective energy, will reveal the answer. This time, Pluto (trine Full Moon) is also on your side, adding depth and transformative power to your quest.
The wiping out of women healers in medieval Europe
“Do you heal sick persons?” the imposing interrogator asked the frail, aging woman.
“Yes, sir,” replied Gostanza da Libbiano, a 60-year-old nun who practiced as a midwife and healer in Tuscany, Italy. It was 1594 and Gostanza was on trial for witchcraft.
“With what kind of medicines?” he barked.
“By picking betony up and washing it like salad and crushing it into a mortar to get its juice, and to give it to my patients for 3, 4, and 5 days, telling them that the more they drunk it, the better it was,” she responded.
Villagers had accused Gostanza of causing the death of several babies. While she admitted to administering ointments to the women during labor, she denied trying to kill the babies. The betony plant has long oval leaves with wrinkled edges; the tops of its tall stalks burst with crowded clusters of tubular purple flowers. The ancient Greeks revered the plant as more important than clothing and used it to treat 47 different illnesses.
The Franciscan inquisitor sentenced Gostanza to torture on the ropes. After being hung by the arms, Gostanza confessed to practicing witchcraft on several patients. She talked of relationships with demons and sucking children’s blood. She said it all started after a devil called Polletto abducted her and took her to infernal sabbaths.
Slated to be burned at the stake, the Florentine inquisitor took pity on her and asked if her confessions were true or if she was just trying to get the torture to stop. Gostanza told him she had made it all up. She was briefly imprisoned and then told to move to another town and swear she would stop practicing medicine. She’d gotten off easier than most.
The medieval Church disagreed that wise women were doing God’s work. Churches were opening universities, professionalizing medicine to be practiced by book-learned men, so they needed to wipe out the competition.
It started off relatively innocently: government-imposed fines and threats of imprisonment or excommunication if caught practicing medicine without a license. When that wasn’t enough to scare them out of their livelihoods, the Catholic and Lutheran churches took things a step further. Between 1400 and 1700, their campaign to eradicate lay healers saw more than 100,000 women in Europe burned at the stake after they were declared to be witches. As Gostanza shows, even nuns weren’t safe from their wrath.
Wise women who practiced folk medicine and midwifery were natural targets of suspicion: often spinsters or widows, peasants who needed to work for a living, lady loners sidelined by society, but they played an important cultural role. And some understood their expertise. They were often right to be skeptical of the skills of these newly professionalized physicians. Universities didn’t teach much more than Christian theology, philosophy, and Hippocratic theories. So unlike their university-trained professional male counterparts, lay women practitioners could offer both knowledge and experience.
Famous English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (born in 1561) found “empirics and old women more happy many times in their cures than learned physicians.” Celebrated philosopher Thomas Hobbes (born in 1588) concurred, noting he’d “rather have the advice or take physic from an experienced old woman that had been at many sick people’s bedsides, than from the learnedst but unexperienced physician.”
Still, wise women could be as feared as they were revered.
“Though lacking a university education and despite the suspicions attached to witchcraft, women still preferred other women to assist them during labor, not only because their experience in the field was considered more trustworthy, but especially because these women were deemed fundamental members of every community,” explained medical historian Donatella Lippi.
Since little was known about the science behind why remedies worked or didn’t, it’s understandable that there was believed to be a supernatural element to healing throughout much of history, across cultures. But it was likely wise women’s deep knowledge of how to grow, prepare, and administer herbal remedies — passed down from parent to child over generations — rather than an intimate connection with gods or devils, that helped women be successful healers.
When we wonder why there aren’t more women physicians recorded in history books, it’s important to remember that there was a time when practicing medicine as a woman could get you killed, that women risked their lives to heal their neighbors.
New York Times bestselling author of WOMEN IN WHITE COATS. Bylines: The Atlantic, The Cut, Aeon, Smithsonian, Guardian. https://oliviacampbell.substack.comFollow
“A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them with equanimity and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without acting upon them.”
Stephen Batchelor (b.1953) British Author
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
Anton Chekhov’s stories are a testament to the way memory can illuminate the path to understanding and endow a life with meaning.
By: Abby Smith Rumsey
( thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
The peculiar nature of human consciousness allows us to reflect on ourselves. We can see ourselves in the moment, as we read this page or walk down the aisle of the grocery store, or see ourselves in the mirror washing our face in the morning. But we can also picture ourselves retrospectively when we think back on our childhood, and prospectively when we anticipate lying on the beach next month, giving birth in three months, or finding a new job in the new year. Nothing is more certain than that I exist, unique from all others who live, have lived, and ever will live. How are these separate selves all recognizable as “me,” given how much “I” change over the course of a lifetime?
The neuroscientist Anil Seth proposes that the apparent continuity of selfhood is to some extent a fine and useful trick that keeps us alive. The body knows itself through a continuous communication between brain, gut, limbs, and the senses. Seth explains that the biological functions of this misperception are critical to self-preservation. The continuity of self doesn’t require conscious effort. It just requires memory. Our ability to keep our multiple selves integrated is the bedrock of our resilience in a world that constantly changes.
In his stories and plays, Anton Chekhov depicted memory as the vital link that not only keeps people physically and mentally whole, but at a deeper level is the source of having hope not despair, knowledge not ignorance, and kindness not cruelty. Memory is the great sifter of human values. Chekhov was a physician who began writing when young to earn money for his tuition, and then to support his large family — his despotic, bankrupt father, long-suffering mother, devoted sisters, and importunate, feckless brothers. He frequently complained about needing money but on occasion would turn down a commission. While in Nice in the winter of 1897, Chekhov received a request from his editor at Cosmopolis for a story taken from his life abroad. He declined. “I can write only from memory,” he replied, “and have never written directly from nature. I must have my memory process a subject, like a filter that leaves only what is important and characteristic.” That winter, instead of writing about the sunlit pleasures of life on the Mediterranean, he turned out stories about young women and men living deep in the Russian provinces with little prospect of escaping from the tedium of their lives — all this from memory.
Chekhov’s great subject was memory itself, with its power to endow a life, no matter how humble, with meaning and, on occasion, states of pure bliss.
At first, this insistence on letting time do its work seems paradoxical, given how vividly Chekhov’s stories incorporate extremely precise, well-observed details that come from everyday life — the way a farm smells of hay, warm manure, and steaming milk in June; that moment of transformation when a singer goes to the top of her range and sounds more birdlike than human; the violet glow of the sea at sunset in the Crimea. These details are not bits of journalistic color, nor are they mere word-count padding (Chekhov got his start by cranking out comic stories and gags for newspapers that paid by the word). These details were elements of the world that bound his characters in time and place and from which they could not escape.
Chekhov made his observation about memory when he was 37 years old. He wintered in the south of France to give his tubercular lungs a rest from the dry frigid air of Moscow. Chekhov was born in 1860, when life expectancy was somewhere in the mid-40s. Atul Gawande has remarked that in 1900, “old age was not seen as something that increased your risk of dying, as it is today, but rather as a measure of good fortune.” Chekhov was not apportioned that measure of good fortune. He died of tuberculosis when he was 44, after years of suffering symptoms of weakness, insomnia, irregular heartbeat, chills, and fevers. He first noticed ruby-red sputum coughed up from his lungs when he was only 25. There was no cure for his disease, but his symptoms could be somewhat relieved by spending time in the south, so he wintered in the Riviera or Crimea.
Chekhov read deeply in Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and others who articulated a revolutionary view of human nature. In this view, humans are thoroughly naturalized, subject to the large-scale evolutionary forces that respond to random events in the environment — a fire that destroys a thriving habitat, a new bacterium that infects a population, a decade of drought. The fate of humanity is no different from the fate of other species. There is no special destiny set out for it. Chekhov was a thoroughgoing Darwinian who spoke with equanimity about outbreaks of cholera as the way that nature culls the weak, even as he was working 20-hour days in his clinic to alleviate the pain and suffering of those affected by the disease. His task as a writer was identical to his task as a doctor and man of science. A writer, he wrote in a letter to Maria Kiselyova, is
a person with an obligation, bound by his awareness of his duty and by his conscience; once he has taken up the pen, there’s no turning back, and no matter how terrible something seems, he is obligated to overcome his squeamishness and sully his imagination with the filth of life. . . .
To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must renounce ordinary subjectivity and understand that the dung heaps on the landscape play a venerable role, and that evil impulses are as much a part of life as the good ones.
That said, his great subject as a writer was not the dung heaps on the landscape. It was memory itself, with its power to endow a life, no matter how humble, with meaning and, on occasion, states of pure bliss. In his plays and short stories, memory becomes more than a noun. It is a verb, an action fleeting and ephemeral, that makes sense of the otherwise random and senseless lives people lead.
Chekhov is said to have been tender, kind, compassionate. As a man, he may have been these things to his friends and patients, but never as a writer. In his stories and plays he depicted people without flattery. Given his acumen as a physician and diagnostician, he made observations that were precise and unsparing. This frankness was not intended to shock, dismay, or dishearten his readers. “The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness.” Few of his characters are masters of their own fate, and even fewer are eager to take responsibility for themselves, let alone others. Chekhov had a dim view of humans’ capacity for self-understanding. Time and again, his characters meet misfortune and are degraded by it. They cheat and are cheated. They lie to themselves and they lie to others. Angry and despairing, they drink to excess. Or they live in indolence, out of cowardice, and keep quiet when they should speak up. We read of people who are offered a chance at happiness and don’t notice it. Or if they do notice it, they turn it down, out of vanity or a passing spasm of spite, or they fret and grow anxious about change and take to their beds. Above all, they succumb to self-pity. They dwell in the past, enumerating their regrets. They worry about the future, paralyzed by anxiety. They stand still and life passes them by.
Yet his stories are studded with moments of gratuitous grace, fleeting as meteors in the moonless night sky, leaving traces long on the retina and even longer in memory. Where do these moments of grace come from? They are always the fruit of a memory stimulated haphazardly and appearing full-blown as a feeling and a vision. The character time-travels to a happier moment, is suffused with contentment, and catches a glimpse of paradise lost, perhaps, but nonetheless real in the moment. It reminds the reader (though seldom the character) how mysteriously, ineluctably, events in the present are linked to the past. Hopes crushed by life, buried beneath layers of disappointment and bitter experience, can return to us in a flash as emeralds or sapphires hardened into crystalline perfection under the tectonic pressures of the earth. For Chekhov, only with the passage of time can we grasp the meaning of an event or a feeling. But we must be patient and bear much pain before anything becomes clear to us.
For Chekhov, only with the passage of time can we grasp the meaning of an event or a feeling.
Among Chekhov’s most affecting works are those that walk right up to the mystery of life’s bitter unfairness and stand still to let us gaze at it. We know it intimately through the unadorned imagery of his prose and unexplained behaviors of his characters. Then, depending upon Chekhov’s mood, he either slaps us in the face (thus making it a comedy) or he steps away and leaves us in a state of wonderment, looking through the door he leaves open for us as he disappears.
In “The Lady with the Little Dog,” the married protagonist Gurov casually starts an affair while on vacation in the Crimea. It wasn’t out of boredom or restlessness, but just his habit of checking out the women wherever he happened to be and making one the target of his seduction. He chose someone he spotted walking on the seaside promenade with her dog. Anna Sergeevna was no more interesting and certainly no more beautiful than any other woman he had dallied with. But for some reason he couldn’t account for, when they parted, he couldn’t forget her. After he returned to his habitual life in Moscow, her image “would be covered in mist in his memory.” Over time, “the memories burned brighter and brighter.” Then they would “turn to reveries, and in his imagination the past would mingle with what was still to be. Anna Sergeevna was not a dream, she followed him everywhere like a shadow and watched him.”
What does the filter of memory reveal to Gurov that he could not otherwise know? As time did its work, sifting through the moments of his life, it left behind the one thing that meant anything to him—the strange, unprepossessing woman without whom he could not live. “Closing his eyes, he saw her as if alive, and she seemed younger, more beautiful, more tender than she was; and he also seemed better to himself than he had been then, in Yalta.” Perhaps these images were a trick of memory, but they revealed the truth to him. There was no escape in the end; his fate was attached to hers. He came to the tormented realization that he loved her. He had never expected to love, he never wanted to love, he didn’t know how to love. Through no power of his own, he became attached to her, and through her, he became attached to the world, something he had never looked for, never wanted, and that he knew was only going to make his life more complicated: “And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.”
Only in Chekhov can we read that lovers are finally united and that is when the difficulties begin. Only in his tales about the vanity of human ambition and the emptiness of people’s promises can we find so much happiness overtaking a poor soul that he feels it almost as an affliction. What does this mean? It was through the work of memory that Gurov found his place in the world. That place was with Anna Sergeevna.
Abby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She chairs the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and is the author of “When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future” and “Memory, Edited,” from which this article is excerpted.
THE HEAVENS—Admitting that His heavenly dictates had made the Franciscan friar suffer enough, God, Our Lord and Heavenly Father, reportedly threw celibate monk Roberto Nevastri a pity wet dream this week. “He’s been so good resisting temptation and respecting chastity over the past few decades that the least I could do is give the poor guy a little release,” said God, adding that seeing the stern expression on Nevastri’s face as he slumbered in his dormitory had convinced the deity that sending the monk a few erotic dreams that culminated in a nocturnal emission wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. “As far as wet dreams go, I can make it pretty tame. It’s been about five years since his last one. So all I have to do is let him fantasize about having missionary-style sex with an anonymous woman for a few brief, joyous seconds. Man, it’s going to absolutely blow his mind.” At press time, God added that He would, of course, also make the monk’s mind fill with a pervading sense of guilt after he awoke to discover his involuntary ejaculation staining the bed sheets.
Stories of werewolves have existed for thousands of years and continue to live on today. They’re especially prominent in European literature and folklore, and often found in cultures where the wolf is the largest natural predator. Over the years its image has continuously evolved, often reflecting the fears and prejudices of that time. Craig Thomson traces the history of werewolves. [Directed by Avi Ofer, narrated by Addison Anderson, music by Salil Bhayani, cAMP Studio].
The Urantia Book (sometimes called The Urantia Papers or The Fifth Epochal Revelation) is a spiritual, philosophical, and religious book that originated in Chicago, Illinois, United States sometime between 1924 and 1955. The authorship remains a matter of debate. It has received various degrees of interest ranging from praise to criticism for its religious and science-related content, its unusual length, and the unusual names and origins of the authors named within the book.
The text introduces the word “Urantia” as the name of the planet Earth and states that its intent is to “present enlarged concepts and advanced truth.”[1][2] The book aims to unite religion, science, and philosophy.[3] Its large amount of content on topics of interest to science is unique among documents said to have been received from celestial beings.[4] Among other topics, the book discusses the origin and meaning of life, mankind’s place in the universe, the history of the planet, the relationship between God and people, and the life of Jesus.
The Urantia Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit group, first published The Urantia Book in 1955. In 2001, a jury found that the English-language book’s copyright was no longer valid in the United States after 1983.[5] Therefore, the English text of the book became a public domain work in the United States,[6] and in 2006 the international copyright expired.[a]
The exact circumstances of the origin of The Urantia Book are unknown. The book and its publishers do not name a human author. Instead, it is written as if directly presented by numerous celestial beings appointed to the task of providing an “epochal” religious revelation.[8][9]
As early as 1911, William S. Sadler and his wife Lena Sadler, physicians in Chicago and well known in the community, are said to have been approached by a neighbor who was concerned because she would occasionally find her husband in a deep sleep and breathing abnormally.[10][11] She reported that she was unable to wake him at these times. The Sadlers came to observe the episodes, and over time, the individual produced verbal communications that claimed to be from “student visitor” spiritual beings.[12][11] This changed sometime in early 1925[12] with a “voluminous handwritten document,” which from then on became the regular method of purported communication.[12][13] The individual was never identified publicly but has been described as “a hard-boiled business man, member of the board of trade and stock exchange.”[11]
The Sadlers were both respected physicians, and William Sadler was a sometime debunker of paranormal claims.[14] In 1929, he published a book called The Mind at Mischief, in which he explained the fraudulent methods of mediums and how self-deception leads to psychic claims. He wrote in an appendix that there were two cases that he had not explained to his satisfaction:[15][16]
The other exception has to do with a rather peculiar case of psychic phenomena, one which I find myself unable to classify. … I was brought in contact with it, in the summer of 1911, and I have had it under my observation more or less ever since, having been present at probably 250 of the night sessions, many of which have been attended by a stenographer who made voluminous notes. A thorough study of this case has convinced me that it is not one of ordinary trance. … This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and, unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities. … Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind. Much of the material secured through this subject is quite contrary to his habits of thought, to the way in which he has been taught, and to his entire philosophy. In fact, of much that we have secured, we have failed to find anything of its nature in existence.
In 1923, a group of Sadler’s friends, former patients, and colleagues began meeting for Sunday philosophical and religious discussions, but became interested in the strange communications when Sadler mentioned the case at their fourth meeting and read samples at their request.[13][12] Shortly afterwards, a communication reportedly was received about which this group would be allowed to devise questions and that answers would be given by celestial beings through the “contact personality.”
Sadler presented this development to the group, and they generated hundreds of questions without full seriousness, but their claim is that it resulted in the appearance of answers in the form of fully written papers.[17] They became more impressed with the quality of the answers and continued to ask questions, until all papers now collected together as The Urantia Book were obtained. The group was known as the Forum, and was formalized as a closed group of 30 members in 1925 who pledged not to discuss the material with others.[18] Over time, some participants left and others joined, leading to a total membership of 486 people over the years from diverse backgrounds and a mix of interest levels.[19][b] A smaller group of five individuals called the Contact Commission, including the Sadlers, was responsible for gathering the questions from the Forum, acting as the custodians of the handwritten manuscripts that were presented as answers, and arranging for proofreading and typing of the material.[21] Bill Sadler, Jr. is noted to have composed the table of contents that is published with the book.[22]
The Sadlers and others involved, now all deceased, claimed that the papers of the book were physically materialized from 1925 until 1935 in a way that was not understood even by them, with the first two parts being completed in 1934 and the third and fourth in 1935.[23] The last Forum gathering was in 1942.[23]
After the last of Part IV was obtained in 1935, an additional period of time supposedly took place where requests for clarifications resulted in revisions. Sadler and his son William (Bill) Sadler, Jr. at one point wrote a draft introduction and were told that they could not add their introduction. The Foreword was then “received.”
The communications purportedly continued for another two decades while members of the Forum studied the book in depth, and according to Sadler and others, permission to publish it was given to them in 1955. The Urantia Foundation was formed in 1950 as a tax-exempt educational society in Illinois,[24] and through privately raised funds, the book was published on October 12, 1955.[25]
Only the members of the Contact Commission witnessed the activities of the “sleeping subject”, and only they knew his identity.[10] The individual is claimed to have been kept anonymous in order to prevent undesirable future veneration or reverence for him.[26]Martin Gardner claims that an explanation concerning the origin of the book more plausible than celestial beings is that the Contact Commission, particularly William Sadler, was responsible. Gardner’s conclusion is that a man named Wilfred Kellogg was the sleeping subject and authored the work from his subconscious mind, with William Sadler subsequently editing and authoring parts.[27]Brad Gooch believes Sadler wrote the book, possibly with help from others on the Contact Commission.[28] A statistical analysis, using the Mosteller and Wallace methods of stylometry, indicates at least nine authors were involved in the Urantia documents. Comparing Sadler’s The Mind at Mischief to the Urantia documents does not indicate authorship or extensive editing of the latter by Sadler, without ruling out the possibility Sadler made limited edits or contributions.[29]
Copyright status
In 1991, after having compiled an index of The Urantia Book and distributed free copies via computer disk and printouts, Kristen Maaherra was sued by the Urantia Foundation for violating their copyright on the book.[30] In 1995, Maaherra won a Summary Judgment declaring the Urantia Foundation’s copyright renewal invalid.[31] Upon appeal, the judgment was reversed and awarded to the Urantia Foundation.[32][33]
Four years later, in 1999, Harry McMullan III and the Michael Foundation published a book, Jesus–A New Revelation, which included verbatim 76 of the 196 papers included in The Urantia Book. McMullan and the Michael Foundation subsequently sought a legal declaration that the Urantia Foundation’s US copyright in The Urantia Book was either invalid or, alternatively, that the copyright had not been infringed upon. Urantia Foundation’s copyright was held to have expired in 1983 because the book was deemed to have been neither a composite work nor a commissioned work for hire. These two arguments having been rejected, a U.S. court held that, since the “sleeping subject” (whom the court referred to as “the Conduit”) had died prior to 1983, only the Conduit’s heirs would have been eligible to renew the copyright in 1983 and, since they had not done so, the Urantia Foundation’s copyright on the book had expired and the book had therefore passed into the public domain. This decision was upheld on appeal.[5] In 2006, the international copyright on the English text expired.[7]
Overview
The Urantia Book is approximately 2,000 pages long, and consists of a body of 196 “papers” divided in four parts, and an introductory foreword:
Part I, titled “The Central and Superuniverses,” addresses what the authors consider the highest levels of creation, including the eternal and infinite “Universal Father,” his Trinity associates, and the “Isle of Paradise.”
Part II, “The Local Universe,” describes the origin, administration, and personalities of the local universe of “Nebadon” the part of the cosmos where Earth resides. It presents narratives on the inhabitants of local universes and their work as it is coordinated with a scheme of spiritual ascension and progression of different orders of beings, including humans, angels, and others.
Part III, “The History of Urantia,” compiles a broad history of the Earth, presenting a purported explanation of the origin, evolution, and destiny of the world and its inhabitants. Topics include Adam and Eve, Melchizedek, essays on the concept of the Thought Adjuster, “Religion in Human Experience,” and “Personality Survival.”
Part IV, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus,” is the largest part at 775 pages, and is often noted as the most accessible[34] and most impressive,[35] narrating a detailed biography of Jesus that includes his childhood, teenage years, family life, and public ministry, as well as the events that led to his crucifixion, death, and resurrection. Its papers continue about appearances after he rose, Pentecost and, finally, “The Faith of Jesus.”
Nature of God
According to The Urantia Book, God is the creator and upholder of all reality[36]—an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite, and eternal spirit personality.[37] The most fundamental teaching about God in the book is that the human concept that most closely approximates the nature of God is that of a Father.[38] Specifically, “the Father idea is [still] the highest human concept of God.”[39] It is also said that, “The face which the Infinite turns toward all universe personalities is the face of a Father, the Universal Father of love.”[40]
God, according to the book, is one Deity who functions on a range of different levels of reality, both personal and impersonal. God is taught to exist in a Trinity of three perfectly individualized persons who are co-equal: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.[41] These persons are referred to by additional titles in the book, primarily as the “Universal Father,” “Eternal Son,” and “Infinite Spirit.”[41][42] While stating that the concept of one God in three persons is difficult to fully understand, the book says that the idea: “…in no manner violates the truth of the divine unity. The three personalities of Paradise Deity are, in all universe reality reactions and in all creature relations, as one.”[43]
The Father, Son, and Spirit are considered “existential” persons of Deity, those in existence from the eternal past to the eternal future.[44] In addition, three persons of Deity are described who are “experiential,” or incomplete and in the process of actualizing: God the Supreme; God the Ultimate; and God the Absolute.[44] Of these three, God the Supreme, or “the Supreme Being,” is given the most explanation, as the person of Deity evolving in time and space to unify finite reality and the infinite. The persons of God the Ultimate and God the Absolute are considered to be remote from the possibility of comprehension and are covered on a limited basis.
Many types of celestial beings are enumerated in the book, and one of particular note is a joint “offspring” of the Universal Father and Eternal Son called a “Creator Son.”[45][46] A divine Creator Son is considered the highest personification of the Universal Father and Eternal Son that is possible for people to know and: “…is, to all practical intents and purposes, God.”[47]Jesus of Nazareth is identified as a Creator Son who incarnated on Earth,[46] and the central theme of the book’s section recounting his life and teachings is that the religion he preached is the highest known to the world.[48]
To “follow Jesus” means to personally share his religious faith and to enter into the spirit of the Master’s life of unselfish service for man. One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
God and the individual
God is described as the Father of each individual, and through the direct gift of a fragment of his eternal spirit, called a Thought Adjuster, is said to be able to guide the individual toward an increased understanding of him.[50][51] The Thought Adjuster is a central teaching of the book[52] and is also referred to as a “Mystery Monitor” and “indwelling presence,”[52] as well as a “divine spark.”[53] The idea is compared within the book to the Hinduatman and the ancient Egyptianka. In relation to biblical traditions, the Thought Adjuster is said to be the meaning behind the phrases “being made in God’s image” and the “kingdom of God is within you”:[54]
The Adjuster is the mark of divinity, the presence of God. The “image of God” does not refer to physical likeness nor to the circumscribed limitations of material creature endowment but rather to the gift of the spirit presence of the Universal Father in the supernal bestowal of the Thought Adjusters upon the humble creatures of the universes.
Each person is said to receive one such fragment at the time of his or her first independent moral decision, on average around the age of five years and 10 months.[52][50] The Adjuster then serves noncoercively as a divine partner in the mind of the individual for the rest of life, and to the extent that a person consents with their free will to want to find God, it leads the person toward more mature, spiritualized thinking. A person’s Thought Adjuster is described as distinct from either the soul or the conscience. In The Urantia Book‘s teachings, the degree to which a human mind chooses to accept its Adjuster’s guidance becomes the degree to which a person’s soul “grows” and becomes a reality that can then survive death. The soul is in essence an embryonic spiritual development,[55] one parental factor being the divine Adjuster and the other being the human will.[56]
The book says: “But you yourself are mostly unconscious of this inner ministry. You are quite incapable of distinguishing the product of your own material intellect from that of the conjoint activities of your soul and the Adjuster.”[57] The book is strongly fideistic and teaches that neither science nor logic will ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of God, arguing that faith is necessary to become conscious of God’s presence in human experience, the Thought Adjuster.[48][58]
Persistently embracing sin is considered the same as rejecting the leadings of the Adjuster, rejecting the will of God. Constant selfishness and sinful choosing lead eventually to iniquity and full identification with unrighteousness, and since unrighteousness is unreal, it results in the eventual annihilation of the individual’s identity.[59][60] Personalities like this become “as if they never were.” The book says that: “…in the last analysis, such sin-identified individuals have destroyed themselves by becoming wholly unreal through their embrace of iniquity.”[60] The concepts of Hell and reincarnation are not taught.[61][62]
The book says that a person ultimately is destined to fuse with his or her divine fragment and become one inseparable entity with it as the final goal of faith.[63] Uniting with the Adjuster fragment is the “reward of the ages,” the moment when a human personality has successfully and unalterably won eternal life,[63] described as typically taking place in the afterlife, but also a possibility during earthly life.[64] The result during human life is a “fusion flash,” with the material body consumed in a fiery light and the soul “translated” to the afterlife. The Hebrew prophet Elijah being taken to heaven without death in “chariots of fire” is said to be a rare example in recorded history of a person who translated instead of experiencing death.
After a person fuses with his or her fragment of God, “then will begin your real life, the ascending life, to which your present mortal state is but the vestibule.”[63] A person continues as an ascending citizen in the universe and travels through numerous worlds on a long pilgrimage of growth and learning that eventually leads to God and residence on Paradise.[65][66] Mortals who reach this stage are called “finaliters.”[63] The book goes on to discuss the potential destinies of these “glorified mortals.”
The book regards human life on earth as a “short and intense test,”[67] and the afterlife as a continuation of training that begins in material life.[55] The “religion of Jesus” is considered to be practiced by way of loving God the Father, thereby learning to love each person the way Jesus loves people; that is, recognizing the “fatherhood of God and its correlated truth, the brotherhood of man,”[68] resulting in unselfish service to others.[69][70]
The book describes that at the center of the cosmos is the stationary Isle of Paradise—the dwelling place of God—with Paradise being surrounded by “Havona,” an eternal universe containing a billion perfect worlds, around which seven incomplete and evolutionary “superuniverses” circle.[71][72]
The word “universe” in the book is used to denote a number of different scales of organization. A “superuniverse” is roughly the size of a galaxy or group of galaxies, and the seven superuniverses along with Paradise-Havona are together designated as the “grand universe.” A “local universe” is a portion of a superuniverse, with 100,000 local universes being in each superuniverse.[71] Beyond the seven superuniverses, uninhabited “outer space levels” are described. The term “master universe” refers to what in modern usage would be the total universe—all existing matter and space taken as a whole.
Urantia is said to be located in a remote local universe named “Nebadon,” which itself is part of superuniverse number seven, “Orvonton.” The physical size of a local universe is not directly stated, but each is said to have up to 10 million inhabited worlds.[71]
History and future of the world
The book’s extensive teachings about the history of the world include its physical development about 4.5 billion years ago, the gradual changes in conditions that allowed life to develop, and long ages of organic evolution that started with microscopic marine life and led to plant and animal life in the oceans, later on land. The emergence of humans is presented as having occurred about a million years ago from a branch of superior primates originating from a lemur ancestor. The first humans are said to have been male and female twins called Andon and Fonta, born “993,419 years prior to 1934.”[73][74]
The Urantia Book teaches not only biological evolution,[3] but that human society and spiritual understandings evolve by slow progression, subject both to periods of rapid improvement and the possibility of retrogression. Progress is said to follow a divine plan that includes periodic gifts of revelation and ministry by heavenly teachers, which eventually will lead to an ideal world status of “light and life” in the far distant future.[75]
Although there is the ideal and divine plan of progression, it is said to be fostered and administered by various orders of celestial beings who are not always perfect. Urantia is said to be a markedly “confused and disordered” planet that is “greatly retarded in all phases of intellectual progress and spiritual attainment” compared to more typical inhabited worlds, due to an unusually severe history of rebellion and default by its spiritual supervisors.[76][77]
Comparisons
Comparison to Christianity
More than one third of the content of The Urantia Book is devoted to a narrative of the life and teachings of Jesus, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is given an importance exceeding any other.[78][79][80] The book’s teachings claim to be a clarification and expansion of Christian belief.[81] However, numerous differences are noted between its teachings and commonly accepted Christian doctrines.[79][82]
Jesus is held in high regard by The Urantia Book, as he is in the New Testament of the Bible.[78] The following are attributed to him in both texts:
He was both human and divine,[83] the Son of God incarnate who was born to Mary, whose husband was Joseph.[84]
He performed many of the miracles described in the Bible, such as the resurrection of Lazarus, the turning of water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, and numerous healings of the blind, diseased, and infirm.[85]
He taught twelve apostles, most of whom went on to spread his teachings.
He was crucified, and on the third day after his death, rose from the dead.
He will return to the world again some day.
Some differences with Christianity include:
Jesus’ crucifixion is not considered an atonement for the sins of humanity.[68] The crucifixion is taught to be an outcome of the fears of religious leaders of the day, who regarded his teachings as a threat to their positions of authority.
Jesus is considered the human incarnation of “Michael of Nebadon,” one of more than 700,000 “Paradise Sons” of God, or “Creator Sons.” Jesus is not considered the second person of the Trinity as he is in Christianity. The book refers to the Eternal Son as the second person of the Trinity.[86]
Jesus was born on Earth through natural means of conception instead of a virgin birth.[87]
Jesus did not walk on water or perform some of the miracles that are attributed to him in the Bible.[88]
Preparing for Bletchley Park: behind the scenes, with Ollie Buckley
OCTOBER 18, 2023 LONDON FUTURISTS SEASON 1 EPISODE 60
London Futurists
Preparing for Bletchley Park: behind the scenes, with Ollie Buckley Preparing for Bletchley Park: behind the scenes, with Ollie Buckley
The launch of GPT-4 on the 14th of March this year was shocking as well as exciting. ChatGPT had been released the previous November, and became the fastest-growing app ever. But GPT-4’s capabilities were a level beyond, and it provoked remarkable comments from people who had previously said little about the future of AI. In May, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described superintelligence as an existential risk to humanity. A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for the leader of a major country to say such a thing.
The following month, in June, Sunak announced that a global summit on AI safety would be held in November at the historically resonant venue of Bletchley Park, the stately home where during World War Two, Alan Turing and others cracked the German Enigma code, and probably shortened the war by many months.
Despite the fact that AI is increasingly humanity’s most powerful technology, there is not yet an established forum for world leaders to discuss its longer term impacts, including accelerating automation, extended longevity, and the awesome prospect of superintelligence. The world needs its leaders to engage in a clear-eyed, honest, and well-informed discussion of these things.
The summit is scheduled for the 1st and 2nd of November, and Matt Clifford, the CEO of the high-profile VC firm Entrepreneur First, has taken a sabbatical to help prepare it.
To help us all understand what the summit might achieve, the guest in this episode is Ollie Buckley.
Ollie studied PPE at Oxford, and was later a policy fellow at Cambridge. After six years as a strategy consultant with Monitor, he spent a decade as a civil servant, developing digital technology policy in the Cabinet Office and elsewhere. Crucially, from 2018 to 2021 he was the founding Executive Director of the UK government’s original AI governance advisory body, the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI), where he led some of the original policy development regarding the regulation of AI and data-driven technologies. Since then, he has been advising tech companies, civil society and international organisations on AI policy as a consultant.
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationThe Gaming Blender Have you ever wanted to design your own video game?
